Hello,
I haven't posted about my side projects in ages, but figured it was time to change that and display some of the dev work I put in on other things than Atmocity currently.
Currently I'm mostly working on the QBCity project. This is mainly because of the many similarities to Atmocity. Working on a smaller scale prototype such as this, allows me to easily test different things I want to add to Atmocity but without having to run tests in a slow environment (Atmocity is a huge project...). For example, way back, this side project laid the foundation for how cars found their way around cities in Atmocity. This was the case up until about a month ago, when traffic in Atmocity was overhauled.
Recently I've been working on a system to add seasons into this prototype and managed to code up a shader that can shift certain colors (in this case pink) using a gradient. This effectively changes the grass color to emulate seasons. On top of this I use the alpha channel to strip the trees of leaves in winter.
With the lessons learned working on a system to handle seasons in QBCity, this will be much easier to do on a large scale (in Atmocity).
Currently I've adapted the existing ground shader in Atmocity to replace an area (using the alpha channel) with grass. The grass texture used is black and white to allow the color to be changed at runtime to emulate seasons in a similar way as above. The main difficulty will be to remove leaves from trees in a way that looks good and transitions well, but using the alpha channel should be a possibility there as well.
